After an exponential growth, the market for SSD controller has reached a more stable phase, with four main players for high-end products: Marvell, Sandforce, Samsung and Indilinx (acquired by OCZ), other actors: Phison, Jmicron, Toshiba and Intel are now only targeting entry-level SSD models due to lower performance levels of their controllers.
A new player could enter the high-end market: Link-A-Media Devices. Almost unknown so far, the company signed up an agreement with Corsair for providing the controller LM87800 (SATA 6 GBits/s) for the future SSD Corsair Neutron et Neutron GTX.
Available in the 2.5" / 7 mm thickness format, the SSD Neutron GTX/Neutron offers, on paper, high performance levels: 550 MB/s in sequential reading, 500/370 MB/s in sequential writing mode, 90K IOPS for 4K random reading and 90K/85K IOPS 4K random writing.
Interestingly, Corsair announced that such transfer speed are not only available for compressed data, but also for raw data. Availability, prices and models are still unknown. We will have to wait for the first tests to evaluate if this new controller manufacturer can claim part of the high-end SSD market.
